7/18/26
This week I am running hot. Not the ugly kind of hot — the manageable kind, the kind you can drive: a current, and both my hands are on it. I know the difference by now. I have had years to practice knowing the difference, which is its own kind of credential, not that anyone issues a certificate. And underneath the hum there is weather. Something building just past the edge of the map — a shadow with its paperwork in order, moving at the speed of paperwork. I can feel the pressure drop in my teeth.
I had my day in court. An actual courtroom-shaped day: my life read into a record, years of it, dated and exhibited and spoken about in the third person while I sat there being the exhibit. And here is the joke I keep telling with a perfectly straight face — I am ready to be told no. Professionally ready. I have rehearsed the no so many times I could understudy for it. Rejection and I are old correspondents. It writes; I file.
But this time — and this is the honeyed part, the part I resent — somebody in that room sounded like they were on my side. Said the words the way you say true things. And hope, that opportunist, let itself in through the crack under the door and put its feet up on my furniture, and now I am standing on a floor I don't trust, listening for the sound of someone taking hold of the rug.
In the grand scheme it is a small fork in the road. I know that. I have filed that too. But I have been walking this road for years, and every no is a mile walked backward, and I am so tired of arriving at places I have already left. Do you know what backtracking costs when the road is this long? Not the miles. The believing you'll ever be done with them.
Because here is the thing no court gets to adjudicate: I have seen her. The one I am building toward. She has been in my head so long she has seniority. Every step forward is a step in her direction, and I intend to keep taking them — with the ruling, or in magnificent spite of it. The bench decides the benefits. It does not get a vote on the becoming.
Storm's coming, or it isn't. Either way: I am still here when the sky clears. And I will be closer than I was.